May 25, 2010

Here's an interesting table from p. 240 of David Willetts's The Pinch of average male life expectancy at the age of 65 in the UK (in other words, in 1950, 65-year-old British men were expected to live to 77.0):

1950: 12.0

1960: 12.2 (+0.2 v. decade earlier)

1970: 12.8 (+0.6)

1980: 14.0 (+1.2)

1990: 15.8 (+1.8)

2000: 18.2 (+2.4)

2010: 21.7 (+3.5) [projected from growth from 18.2 in 2000 to 21.0 in 2008]

So, for every four days you live, you only get three days closer to death? What better excuse for procrastinating?

14 comments:

That increase all occurred under the Brits' socialized medicine, the National Health Service. So, under Obamacare, our lives should increase by 10 years. And if we adopted Stalin's socialized medicine -- oh, never mind.

The NHS was pretty good at providing health care to the middle aged working class, though not to the elderly, who tend to be treated very badly.

I suspect though the main reason for increase in male life expectancy at the top end is the change in work; men are no longer being worn out by decades of arduous and dangerous manual labour. This gives men of retirement age a much better life expectancy.

I read a book on life in Britain during the War (WWII, not the Great War) and one thing the author said is that, even though rationing continued until the mid-50's, the generation that grew up during the war had the best health of any that they had seen. One (possible) reason: almost every child got Cod Liver Oil supplements.

My mother grew up in Scotland during the war and said that each day, before school, they would all get in line and get a spoonful of Cod Liver Oil (with Malt extract to help it go down a little better).

"The discovery of vitamins A and D at the end of the First World War explained the health-giving effects of the oil, which is rich in these vitamins. It became popular with both parents and doctors. During the Second World War and for a quarter of a century after its end, it was made available free to all British children."

A theory as to why that is happening is the revealed slow aging hypothesis. Basically, people who age faster also mature faster, therefore survive infections and trauma better. When infection and trauma decrease, slow aging people survive at a higher rate, therefore the current population of older people contains a higher proportion of slow aging people than in the past.

My gut instinct is that life-expectancy numbers right now, for the mid- to long-term, are about as accurate as government budget predictions for the near- to mid-term.

[Seriously - who knows what the USA budget deficit will be in 2020 - whether the USA will still even exist in 2020, or whether, at that point, the USA will have been divided into a "Red State" free republic and a "Blue State" socialist basket case.]

Just in the USA alone, this is what dysgenic fertility has wrought, status post Griswold and Roe and the rise of nihilism amongst our elites [see Table 9]:

That just isn't a sufficiently large Caucasian base upon which to draw doctors to service the oceans of Negroes and Central American Aboriginals who will overwhelm our healthcare infrastructure in the coming decades.

And nationally, we're still sporting a Caucasian total fertility rate up around 1.86 [which breaks downs as roughly a Blue State Caucasian TFR of 1.47 and a Red State Caucasian TFR of 2.08]; the British Caucasian TFR is much, much lower than 1.86 [probably no higher than about 1.5], so as the Caucasian Brits are subsumed by the Arab & Pakistani & Bangladeshi Muslims, the British healthcare system will be heading to straight to Hell [in a handbasket].

Of course, at that point, the leading cause of death for British Caucasians might very well be death by beheading [by sword]...

This reminds me of falling murder rates. The murder attempts might not have fallen, but medical heroics mean the victim doesn't actually die. So he wasn't murdered.

Similarly, if gov't funded health care will pay for treatments then the old guys will hang on. If they had to use their own money and deprive their surviving spouse a livelihood and kids an inheritance, the old guys would more often die than leave their families destitute by exhausting their savings to extend their own lives. However if he is just taking from the big pot of govt largesse, he feels entitled.

Speaking of life expectancies, I just read Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, In it he points out that most doctors seem to assume that times series distributions for disease mortality are symmetrical whereas they are actually quite skewed. His example is the prognosis of Steven Jay Gould after his initial cancer diagnosis.

You wrote his obituary for National review in which you said that he had "beat cancer". Taleb suggests that there is another way to look at it.

I was interested in another fatal disease. When heart failure patients are first diagnosed they learn that half die within five years.

As it happens I was diagnosed with heart failure five years ago. Sounds serious, doesn't it? Well no - its not very serious at all.

With further checking I found that one third died in the first year. That is to say if you make it past the first year you're golden. The difference in life expectancy between those with the diagnosis and those without declines over time approaching the mortality risk of normals the longer you live. So Gould wasn't any sort of extreme anomaly and I am likely to live longer than I had assumed.

This presents something of a problem as I had intended to exhaust my savings just before my rapidly approaching death. Now that I understand that I may live longer I must consider that I'm going to run out of funds.

It is said that the truth will set you free, in my case it will put me back to work.

Anon:"the British Caucasian TFR is much, much lower than 1.86 [probably no higher than about 1.5], so as the Caucasian Brits are subsumed by the Arab & Pakistani & Bangladeshi Muslims, the British healthcare system will be heading to straight to Hell [in a handbasket]."

1.5 sounds about right; still quite a lot higher than in the Mediterranean but well below replacement, while the non-white population is exploding.

My experience of the London NHS is that it's already pretty hellish, enlivened only by the occasional white-Rhodesian technician or ex-army Indian doctor. The general bulk of African midwives, young female Pakistani doctors, Tamil dental assistants et al are pretty atrocious. Some of the Irish nurses are not bad though.

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